"That justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme." - Reflections on psyche and spirit, politics, poetry and prose

Friday, 01 November 2013

All Saints

It's one day past the Day
of the Dead, and this has been
a bad year, six funerals already and not done yet.
But on this blue day of perfect weather, I can't muster
sadness, for the trees are radiant, the air thick as Karo
warmed in a pan. I have my friend's last book spread
on the table and a cup of coffee in a white china mug.
All the leaves are ringing, like the tiny bells of God.
My mother, too, is ready to leave. All she wants now
is sugar: penuche fudge, tapioca pudding, pumpkin roll.
She wants to sit in the sun, pull it around her shoulders
like an Orlon sweater, and listen to the birds
in the far-off trees. I want this sweetness to linger
on her tongue, because the days are growing shorter
now, and night comes on, so quickly.

HOW THEY
DO LIVE on, those giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take
even death in their stride because although death can put an end to them right
enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them. Wherever or
however else they may have come to life since, it is beyond a doubt that they
live still in us. Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no
longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where
everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with
the life that is in it still. The people we loved. The people who loved us. The
people who, for good or ill, taught us things. Dead and gone though they may
be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is as though they come to
understand us— and through them we come to understand ourselves— in new ways
too. Who knows what “the communion of saints” means, but surely it means more
than just that we are all of us haunted by ghosts because they are not ghosts,
these people we once knew, not just echoes of voices that have years since
ceased to speak, but saints in the sense that through them something of the
power and richness of life itself not only touched us once long ago, but
continues to touch us. They have their own business to get on with now, I
assume—“ increasing in knowledge and love of Thee,” says the Book of Common
Prayer, and moving “from strength to strength,” which sounds like business
enough for anybody— and one imagines all of us on this shore fading for them as
they journey ahead toward whatever new shore may await them; but it is as if
they carry something of us on their way as we assuredly carry something of them
on ours. That is perhaps why to think of them is a matter not only of
remembering them as they used to be but of seeing and hearing them as in some
sense they are now. If they had things to say to us then, they have things to
say to us now too, nor are they by any means always things we expect or the
same things.

From Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac:

Today is All Saints' Day, and Pope Julius II chose this
day in 1512 to display Michelangelo's paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel for the first time. It took Michelangelo four years to complete the
paintings that decorate the ceiling of the chapel. The paintings are of scenes
from the Old Testament, including the famous center section, "The Creation
of Adam." The chapel itself was built about 25 years earlier, and various
Renaissance painters were commissioned to paint frescos on the walls.

Michelangelo was 33 years old at the time, and he tried to point
out to the pope that he was a sculptor, and not really a painter, but the pope
wouldn't listen. Michelangelo used his skills as a sculptor to make the
two-dimensional ceiling look like a series of three-dimensional scenes — a
technique that was relatively new at the time. It took him four years to finish
the job, between 1508 and 1512. He worked from a scaffold 60 feet above the
floor, and he covered about 10,000 square feet of surface. Every day, fresh
plaster was laid over a part of the ceiling and Michelangelo had to finish
painting before the plaster dried.

The German writer Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, "We cannot
know what a human being can achieve until we have seen [the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel]."

Comments

It's one day past the Day
of the Dead, and this has been
a bad year, six funerals already and not done yet.
But on this blue day of perfect weather, I can't muster
sadness, for the trees are radiant, the air thick as Karo
warmed in a pan. I have my friend's last book spread
on the table and a cup of coffee in a white china mug.
All the leaves are ringing, like the tiny bells of God.
My mother, too, is ready to leave. All she wants now
is sugar: penuche fudge, tapioca pudding, pumpkin roll.
She wants to sit in the sun, pull it around her shoulders
like an Orlon sweater, and listen to the birds
in the far-off trees. I want this sweetness to linger
on her tongue, because the days are growing shorter
now, and night comes on, so quickly.

HOW THEY
DO LIVE on, those giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take
even death in their stride because although death can put an end to them right
enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them. Wherever or
however else they may have come to life since, it is beyond a doubt that they
live still in us. Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no
longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where
everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with
the life that is in it still. The people we loved. The people who loved us. The
people who, for good or ill, taught us things. Dead and gone though they may
be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is as though they come to
understand us— and through them we come to understand ourselves— in new ways
too. Who knows what “the communion of saints” means, but surely it means more
than just that we are all of us haunted by ghosts because they are not ghosts,
these people we once knew, not just echoes of voices that have years since
ceased to speak, but saints in the sense that through them something of the
power and richness of life itself not only touched us once long ago, but
continues to touch us. They have their own business to get on with now, I
assume—“ increasing in knowledge and love of Thee,” says the Book of Common
Prayer, and moving “from strength to strength,” which sounds like business
enough for anybody— and one imagines all of us on this shore fading for them as
they journey ahead toward whatever new shore may await them; but it is as if
they carry something of us on their way as we assuredly carry something of them
on ours. That is perhaps why to think of them is a matter not only of
remembering them as they used to be but of seeing and hearing them as in some
sense they are now. If they had things to say to us then, they have things to
say to us now too, nor are they by any means always things we expect or the
same things.

From Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac:

Today is All Saints' Day, and Pope Julius II chose this
day in 1512 to display Michelangelo's paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel for the first time. It took Michelangelo four years to complete the
paintings that decorate the ceiling of the chapel. The paintings are of scenes
from the Old Testament, including the famous center section, "The Creation
of Adam." The chapel itself was built about 25 years earlier, and various
Renaissance painters were commissioned to paint frescos on the walls.

Michelangelo was 33 years old at the time, and he tried to point
out to the pope that he was a sculptor, and not really a painter, but the pope
wouldn't listen. Michelangelo used his skills as a sculptor to make the
two-dimensional ceiling look like a series of three-dimensional scenes — a
technique that was relatively new at the time. It took him four years to finish
the job, between 1508 and 1512. He worked from a scaffold 60 feet above the
floor, and he covered about 10,000 square feet of surface. Every day, fresh
plaster was laid over a part of the ceiling and Michelangelo had to finish
painting before the plaster dried.

The German writer Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, "We cannot
know what a human being can achieve until we have seen [the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel]."